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New Administrative Leader Takes Reins at CUMC
CUMC Administration
| CUMC's New COO Has Hit the Ground Running Lisa Hogarty sets sights on short range and long range goals to improve quality of campus life for all |
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For the previous five years, Ms. Hogarty was executive vice president for student and administrative services at Columbia University. During this time she reorganized human resources and information technology, implemented an electronic student health record that significantly reduced wait times, improved student living conditions, and transformed commencement into an almost rock concert-like event. Before joining Columbia, she spent nine years in top leadership positions in facilities operations and hospital support services at New York hospitals, responsible for multi-million dollar budgets. She has also worked in the hotel industry and as a stage manager in the theater. In her new role, Ms. Hogarty reports to Lee Goldman, MD, executive vice president and dean of the faculties of health sciences and medicine at CUMC, and oversees IT, HR, facilities, space planning, communications, government and community affairs, and libraries. A basic theme throughout Ms. Hogarty’s career has been the belief that organizations can get better. Arriving at CUMC at a time when the medical center is experiencing significant financial challenges, Ms. Hogarty remains undaunted. With seemingly boundless energy, she appears to be everywhere at once, eager to meet and serve faculty and staff. “In the kind of work I do, it’s impossible to understand all that is happening by sitting in my office,” she says. InVivo recently caught up with Ms. Hogarty during a brief respite in a day that had begun, as it often does, at 7 a.m., to see how things are progressing a few months into her new role. What are your current priorities? My overarching goal is to smooth the way for all the health sciences schools to have the tools to function as optimally as possible. We have incredible faculty and superb students. What we need is an improved infrastructure, and for all processes to run smoothly. My immediate short-term priorities are to upgrade facilities and streamline HR procedures. Why are these two functions so important? CUMC is a wonderful place to work on so many levels. On a daily basis faculty here interact with other clinicians, scientists, and educators who are changing people’s lives. These are wonderful selling points when we try to recruit. It’s critical, then, that the act of joining the medical center is as stress-free and pleasant as possible. And it’s important for all our employees to know that HR is a place where their questions can be addressed in a timely and efficient manner. As for facilities – many of us are working here in 80-year-old buildings. Most of our competitors on the east coast, such as Johns Hopkins and Mass General, have completely replaced their early 20th century buildings. We simply must upgrade in order to retain and recruit new faculty and staff. We want to get out of the situation where someone may not want to come here because we can’t provide him or her with something as basic as adequate lab space. How are you addressing the infrastructure challenges? Several months ago we instituted a new budget plan – AIM HI [‘align interests and maximize healthy incentives’] – that addresses the medical school’s deficits. We are looking for ways to boost revenue and manage costs in each P&S department, without going the classic route of slashing budgets. With AIM HI, everyone participates in both revenue sharing and cost sharing to create the fiscal turnaround. By generating more revenue we will be able to make the investments in school-wide programs and initiatives needed to place P&S among the top five U.S. medical schools – a key goal of Dean Goldman’s. One of the ways to raise revenue is to require that departments pay their share for the space they occupy, rather than have central administration absorb all of these costs, as has historically been the case. As our faculty has learned more about this new financial model, they have begun to carefully assess their use of space. We are starting to see departments ready to give back to central operations space they no longer need or wish to pay for. If you had asked a faculty member, even just a few months ago, about the space situation at CUMC, he or she would likely have said that we’ve been out of space for the past 10 years. Now, because of this sea change in philosophy, that person might be happy to give up a certain amount of non-productive space or rent it out to someone else who can really use it. Suddenly, space is being made available where no one ever imagined it even existed. A big part of my job now is being available to our faculty to walk them through the logistics of all these space rearrangements. What other infrastructure issues are you addressing? We are dealing now with a campus originally configured in a unique way by Edward Harkness, the man who gave the land that the medical center was built on. He stipulated that the university and the hospital enter into a partnership that essentially meant the two could never be separated – university buildings sit on land owned by the hospital and vice versa. That means that all the infrastructure for university buildings – steam pipes, electricity, water pipes – are controlled by the hospital. Whenever there needs to be any type of construction or repair to a university building, we must work with the hospital to ensure that the work can be done. With infrastructure that is now almost 100 years old, and with a desire by the medical center to perform many upgrades in the coming years, we are now meeting regularly with the hospital to address infrastructure issues. This brings up another key aspect of my job, which is to build a closer working relationship with our NYPH colleagues. We are neighbors, friends and co-workers and our lives intersect here. When it comes to something like facilities maintenance, I’m trying to tease out basic things, like who is responsible for housekeeping in specific university areas. Sometimes the university is responsible, but sometimes it’s hospital staff, even though it’s a university building. This has not been altogether obvious until now. I’m working to clear up any confusion that may have existed, with the goal of better maintenance of our buildings. Improving quality of life and services for students was a large part of your job on the Morningside campus. What changes are on the horizon for CUMC student life? I’ve met with students from most of the health sciences schools and I can say that without exception, the caliber of students here is extraordinary. What’s even more extraordinary is that we attract such high quality students even when our facilities are not ideal and service delivery is intermittent. Students come here because our faculty is truly world-class. Improving facilities is a major priority now because of Dr. Goldman’s often stated desire to boost P&S back into the top-five ranking of medical schools in the country. If we can provide students with better facilities and housing, that will surely help, ultimately, with rankings. In the near-term, we are focusing on creating a new education center on lower levels 1 and 2 of the library. This 36,000-square-foot space will have modern classrooms equipped with state-of-the art electronics that will give faculty the best possible teaching tools. There will also be ample study and social spaces and new auditoriums. Importantly, all four schools have been at the table during the planning of the center, participating equally in decisions about the space. We are already setting up temporary study spaces for people to use when construction begins at the end of April. I have also been asked to work with the deans of students at all the schools to build a more comprehensive student services capability. All student health providers here are superb, but access to facilities is less than desirable. We plan to install an electronic health record for students, similar to the one downtown, which reduced wait times for services by half; we also plan to consolidate the two student insurance programs we currently have into one program. CUMC recently committed to developing a patient electronic health record. How will this benefit the medical center? This is part of the general upgrade of facilities and processes. The electronic health record is a major step toward improving both the patient and faculty experience here. It will enable clinical staff throughout the medical center and NYPH to access outpatient data by computer and will streamline patient care, billing, scheduling and lab information. The project was launched this past summer by the Faculty Practice Organization after trustee approval. The electronic record eliminates redundancies in data collection, provides for continuity in patient care and ensures patient safety. On a very basic level it also frees up office space now being consumed by voluminous amounts of patient records. Both patient and doctor will see advantages. And we’re working to ensure that as we roll out the electronic record, people are comfortable learning how to use it. There will be online training, one-on-one tutorials, and group training. Can you paint a picture of what this campus will look like a decade from now? Actually, it will probably take about a decade for Dr. Goldman to realize his vision of a state-of-the-art education hub, reasonable student housing accommodations, and adequate research space. One of the major projects that will come to fruition is the fifth and last building that comprises the Audubon Biomedical Science and Technology Park, a nearly 240,000-square-foot building that is the third academic research building [the others are the Russ Berrie Medical Science Pavilion and the Irving Cancer Research Center]. It will rise on a site adjacent to the Berrie Pavilion sometime in the next seven years. We will see a cleaner and greener 168th Street, with more trees planted as part of the city’s drive to reduce its carbon footprint. And we will continue to support the city’s efforts to upgrade the subway station and the armory. The focus will largely be on west side of Fort Washington Avenue. We intend to create a campus hub along the 168th Street corridor leading into Haven Avenue – that’s where students are housed, near the education center. Eventually, we would like to tear down Bard and build new dormitories, but this will have to wait until funds can be raised for this purpose. As for the inside spaces – I envision much more gracious entryways and lobbies – primarily for P&S and the Black Building, but also for the Augustus C. Long Library, which will be redesigned along with the education center. The bottom line is that in the coming years we will transform CUMC both from the inside and out, to give our outstanding faculty, students and staff the facilities and support they need and deserve. —Anna Sobkowski |
